Businesses need welcoming and engaging entries and grounds, so they naturally turn to landscape professionals to keep their outside areas looking great. Busy homeowners also hire landscape professionals to install and maintain their properties. These landscape professionals have a love of nature, like creating garden spaces with plants, and enjoy working outside.

Michigan State University and Lake Michigan College have partnered to offer the agriculture programs together. Students take half of the credits needed for each program through LMC and the other half through MSU, so students must be dually enrolled at both LMC and MSU.

Career Information

Horticulturists working in landscaping perform a wide variety of duties to keep area landscapes looking their best. They install plantings, hardscapes, and irrigation systems, and water plants; scout for insects, disease, and weed pests; and decide how and when to control those pests. Horticulturists also maintain equipment; prune plants; transplant trees, shrubs, vines, perennial, and annual plantings; and maintain these plantings for their customers. There are many other tasks that are seasonally dependent, such as snow removal and bulb planting. read more

Classroom Experience

Students in the Applied Plant Sciences programs get many different classroom experiences. From biology and chemistry courses to English and math, students experience small classroom sizes and individual attention from instructors in many general education courses. Some MSU courses are held in the interactive television room where the instructor can be in East Lansing, Traverse City, or in the same ITV room. Other courses are in either labs or in classrooms at LMC, and a few are online courses. read more